The free selector's landscape: Moulding the Victorian farming districts 1870—1915

摘要

In his report for 1872, the District Land Officer at Echuca wrote: With the land act of 1869 a great transformation in the seasons took place, the rainfall increased, the grass became abundant, steady and increasing settlement took place, which has now amounted to a rush, and the cry is still they come. Echuca was only one of a series of land offices where eager selectors gathered in the first years after the introduction of Victoria's Free Selection Act to register the blocks they had optimisticallypegged out. Over the course of the next four decades these men and women were to transform the landscape of Victoria and create a viable system of European farming. In this article, I first examine the impact of this settlement on the natural landscape, and, second, explore how the landscape in turn shaped the systems of farming that emerged by the Great War.